The cellular phone market is currently experiencing an explosive growth of smart phones. One of the driving forces behind the smart phone market is the number of mobile applications available on a specific manufacturer's device. For Apple, the iPhone has seen tremendous growth since its introduction thanks to the thousands of mobile applications available in its App Store. One of the popular mobile applications in its store is Taxi Magic, which allows iPhone users to book a taxi cab without talking to the dispatcher of the cab company and be able to check status of its arrival using the GPS feature from the cab. Furthermore, it also allows users to pay for the cab fare by using a credit card on file. Taxi Magic will take the money from the user's credit card to pay to the cab company. There are many similar services from Apple, Android, Blackberry and other device manufacturers' mobile application stores.
There are similarities in these mobile applications. First, they rely heavily on the GPS feature of the handset to find the location of the taxi or location of the user. Second, they all deliver a booking service for taxi or other transportation for hire by either tapping directly into the cab companies' computer system, or directly into the booking meter of the individual taxi cab itself.
Booking service is one of the many applications that highlight the importance of immediate, urgent needs for interaction for business purposes or other purposes with specific locality. Other applications might be emergency trade services such as plumbing, electrician, roof repairs, emergency veterinarian service, road side assistance, trip assistance, etc. all about the immediate, urgent needs for interaction with a near in location provider. The aforementioned services address the booking or confirmation of the request for services, but they do not provide a live mechanism for all parties to interact to conduct business. This presents a problem.
As such, a need exists for a system that can provide to its users the needed live interaction with a local provider without the user having to know the provider's phone number, contact information, or even location so long as the provider provides service coverage of the area where the requesters would be. Such a system, in order to be useful, must be able to receive requests in any media format available to the end users, whether or not it's from the Internet, the mobile handset itself, or through texting (Short Messaging System or SMS and its variations). This presents a technical problem for which a technical solution using a technical means is needed.